Monthly Archive for July, 2004

Ok, so it’s in. It works. Technically. I can access many websites, I can download some of my non-brown email accounts. I can even use AOL Instant Messenger. But I can’t access a whole plethora of necessary sites: brown.edu, columbia.edu, mlb.com, washingtonpost.com, wired.com. It’s a crapshoot to find out what sites are going to work and which ones are not.

Notably, none of the popular image hosting sites work at all (ofoto, funtigo, yahoo!photos, msn photos, etc.) which is just totally maddening. Nobody out there in digital land has seen any pictures of me climbing mountains, negotiating with richshawwallas, or playing Trivial Pursuit. I’ve got to get this sorted out.

Sidenote: The title ”-walla” literally means “one associated with [blank].” It’s used off to mean, basically, “one who sells [blank].” But you can use it all over the place. I created the term DSLwalla because it sounded funny and I think the guy liked it. You could argue, and people have, that last October Lenehan and I were “whiskeywallas,” or, perhaps more truly accurate, “Soxwallas.” Anyway, I gather the use of this term has generated quite a bit of confusion and I thought I’d set it straight. Hope that was helpful.

I’m in class right now, and the discussion has devolved into a very idiosyncratic, microcosmic analysis of a part of a problem that used to be interesting. So I was looking through my bag to check my schedule for my next class, when a spider jumped out of my bag at me. It was only maybe an inch plus across, but it jumped! It missed me and fell on the floor, where it proceeded to walk a few steps, jump five inches forward, walk a few more steps, jump five more inches. What an amazing little thing. I guess I’m glad I didn’t stomp on it immediately.

The wildlife in general in this country is continually, and by turns, amazing and vexing. I had so many misconceptions when I first came here. For example, I thought monkeys would be cool little animals that I could give bananas to and semi-play with. They’d be like squirrels but smarter. No. Monkeys are the terrorists of the Indian geopoliticobiosphere. They’re crazy. If you look at them wrong, or, god help you, you happen to smile and thus bare your teeth, they totally flip out. They’ll jump up and down and scream and get real aggressive. They’re constantly on the move and getting into places they shouldn’t be, like bathrooms and classrooms and hallways here at St. Stephen’s. They steal things like fruit and small bags like purses and then literally laugh at people that run after them trying to get them back. They launch precision strikes on fruit stands, some making an obvious diversion in front of the fruitwalla while others will climb over a wall, unseen, to grab a ton of fruit and then take off.

Bastards.

In the mountains, they’d constantly be making a ruckus on the way to school. We had to carry rocks to throw at them just in case. I got quite good at monkey pummeling. They hated me even more, I think. They were particularly bad when I was on the phone at the telephone booth. The booth had a thin tin roof and when there were a bunch of people inside they would jump on top of the roof and just jump up and down and pound, making as much noise as possible. Phonewalla would run out and throw stuff at them and they’d leave, but everyday I was left with one thought: war on terror… and monkeys. Just as terrorists manage to find every weakness in the massive endeavor that is the US security structure, monkeys found precision ways to drive humans crazy. I think they’re still jealous that we evolved and they didn’t.

Bastards.

In the mountains, I also had lots of interesting interactions with scorpions. The scorpions up in the mountains were small but apparently packed quite a painful punch. There was one in our downstairs bathroom one day, which really freaked out the girls. We’ve got some very cool pictures, which will be uploaded eventually (damned DSLwalla!). The other two that I had to remove I ran into in the middle of the night on the way to the bathroom. Both times they were on near the wall in the hallway, rather scurrying about looking for something. They’re really stupid animals, actually. They’ll just sit there as you place a matchbox over them and box them up. When you throw them outside, when they land they just sit there again, as if to contemplate the metaphysical aspects of them getting kicked out of the house. Then they scurry off to strike fear into the hearts of monkeys, rabbits, and girls from Georgetown everywhere.

Also notable for home invasion are the lizards. Cat had an unwanted roommate for a few days last week: a 6 inch, hyper-active lizard. We have no idea how it got in, but it lived just above her curtains, and would creep out to explore every once in a while. Cat did not deal all that well with her roommate, though she stopped yelling after the first two times or so. The lizard was actually really cool looking (Rob was jealous that it came into Cat’s room and not ours. I pointed out that it would freeze to death in our gorgeously arctic room).

All in all, the wildlife here is a very interesting and very constant part of life. No tigers yet, but they use these huge elephants to do large-scale maintenance in some of the big parks in Delhi: things like clearing out fallen tree branches, moving huge rocks, etc. I’m not sure how well-taken care of they are. Alas.

Alright, I’m off. Gotta get back to class. Hope all is well.

DSL still isn’t working. Sorry. Will try to update as soon as possible with something of interest.

UPDATE: Okay, after much unsuccessful harassment, we’ve pretty much decided to switch DSL companies. I’m in the process of pricing out other offers. Regardless of who we choose, it’s unlikely that we’ll get anything installed before the weekend. Alas. So I’ll continue to use the connection here at school, which is painfully slow and shared by up to 20 students at the same time. God I miss Brown’s T3. In the meantime, read the entry above for a small clue into how my life is here.

Party
We had a going away party last Friday night. It was a nice event, all around, with some hilarious moments, of which I’ll share an edited few:

:: Me being the only sober person for 8 hours straight.

:: Twenty University of California students showing up at the same time. None of them wanted to drink, and almost all of them looked at us like we were totally crazy.

:: This exchange between me and an unidentified Columbia student:
“Dude, where’s the girl?”
“What girl?”
“The girl outside.”
“, we are outside.”
Pause.
“Touche.”

:: The son of the Principal of the Landour Language School getting tipsy and proclaiming to us all that “I can destroy you all with my mind alone!” He’s 17.

:: Four hours of some unbelievably funny dancing.

:: A 15-minute debate between and unidentified Brown student and an unidentified UC student about whether or not the fruits in question were in fact pickled lemons or pickled limes, culminating in this brilliant observation: “No, no. Trust me. I’m a music person. Lemon’s have a kind of a decrescendo that limes do not. This is a decrescendo. This is a lemon. This is not a lime.”

:: Twenty UC students all leaving at once, without a word exchanged between them or us about it. Rather a psychic moment.

:: “This whole not-drinking thing makes you creepy.” – Maive, a UC student, regarding me. I have no idea what she was talking about.

After the mass of UC students left I just became the general photographer/caretaker of my crazily dancing friends. The music continued till about 3 in the morning when I had the presence of mind to realize that we were probably keeping the whole valley awake. It took some convincing, but the music came down. It went back up again the first time I left the room, but came down permanently after that. There was much conversation and laughing till closing in on a lightening sky.

Leaving
We all got up early to a laughing Gambhir. Apparently, he came down several times to check on us through the windows and found us hilarious. So did his whole family. Apparently. Our last breakfast in Mussoorie was fantastic. It was mostly the same as we’d been having every day before school, but everything was just really well done. There was new jam, the eggs were seasoned a little bit but not too much. It was just nice. Lunch was the same way: still dal and rice, but with a new kind of fragrance and a more smooth taste.

After lunch we all rushed to pack everything and get in the taxis by 3:00. I hadn’t remembered bringing that much stuff, but jesus my pack was heavy. After my experience at the Delhi station the first time, I was highly distrustful of porters so I carried my own, heavy bag up the stairs to the taxis (160.5 stairs at 9000 feet – not an easy task), to the train, and loaded it in the luggage rack all by myself. Although everyone else blindly trusted their valuables and all their clothes for the next 5 months to people they didn’t know, couldn’t communicate with, and who were paid at a rate well below India’s laughable poverty line, I thought it’d be prudent not to. Plus I didn’t have to pay anything, which was good. But it seemed I was being overly cautious. No one lost their bags. Every single one made it to the train and up on the rack.

The taxi ride down to Dehradun was one of the most beautiful I’ve ever taken. I’ve been reading My Life, by Bill Clinton, which is rather great, but I couldn’t even touch it during the ride down. It had just rained that afternoon while we were packing, and it the rain was still a fading presence as we snaked around mountain hillsides and descended to the plains. This light, misty composition to the air made it explode in yellows and pinks and blues. As the clouds exhausted themselves, the whole of the valley was visible to us, literally hundreds of miles across to the horizon, where another, smaller, mountain range stuck up like tacks through the backside of a paper. Off to the northwest the sun reflected off the rivers that fell from the mountains and rolled toward their ocean destiny. The whole thing was golden and glittering and dramatic. I don’t think the people of Dehradun will ever know how gorgeous their dirty, polluted, crowded, impolite little city looked that day. I don’t think anyone could ever really relate it to them. In a sense it was India defined: massive, inexplicable, tear-inducing natural beauty laid over an intricate human problem. How blessed this country is, and how cursed.

The train ride to Delhi was largely uneventful. I wrote letters to people and read Clinton’s book. Brinda met us at the Delhi station (she actually knew, somehow, what car we were on and came on the car with porters to help us take our stuff away). Outside the train station, we realized that this, really, was it. Over the past month our Brown-in-India group has become very tight, very family-like. They’ve been invaluable in helping me tear me thoughts away from the western horizon and a particular star in the sky and placing me back in the here and now. I feel amazingly comfortable with every single member of the group and love them dearly. At Delhi Railway Station, though, we realized that our family was going to be broken and placed across a metropolis from itself. Myra, Marla, and Jenn are going to Lady Shri Ram College on Delhi’s south side (Greater Kailaish – Part 1 if you’re keeping score at home). I’m going to miss their everyday presence. The first-month family turned asunder. Alas.

Delhi
God this place is big. I haven’t felt in the presence of such a mass of humanity since I flew into Los Angeles on the way back from Sydney. It just keeps going and going and going… It’s so muddled and so buzzing, as well. On every road there are people walking, sitting, sleeping, driving. There are cows walking totally unmolested through the streets, looking for random grass to cut down. Skinny dogs nimbly pick dropped food off sidewalks, dodging the brooms and rocks hurtled at them from shopkeepers (dukhandars, in Hindi). There’s tons of green and brown. Organic life just busts out of every crack and crevice, every median is a developed jungle, every sidewalk an impromptu garden. How blessed this country is… Dust swirls from air pushed by tires to the side of the road and back, occasionally lifting off the ground to pepper eyes, ears and noses (thank the lord for q-tips, or ear buds as they call them here). …and how cursed.

From all accounts, this is the weirdest monsoon season on record. The monsoon is over two weeks late. It usually arrives with mechanical precision on June 29, I believe (can’t be positive on that quite yet) and, despite our impressions and the declarations of weathermen at the time, the downpour we got when we left for Mussoorie was not the start of the Monsoon. The government says that they’re giving it a week more before they declare a crisis situation. India depends on the monsoon rains because it’s the only rain they get the whole year, basically. It rains like hell between June and late September and then not again till late March if they’re lucky. So it needs to happen soon or it might not happen at all, goes the logic. And if it doesn’t happen at all, people will die on an epic scale and it’s quite possible I’ll have to leave India prematurely. So pray for some damn rain, please.

Home Sweet Home
The Raj Narain Road Apartment is just gorgeous. It’s a little more sparse than I remember, but just as big and just as comfortable. Rob and I have the corner room with an extremely powerful air conditioner. Now that I’ve got all my stuff moved in and I’m quite settled, it’s really starting to feel homey. It’ll feel even more homey when we get our super-p1mped out cable modem in here at the end of the week and I can upload some pictures to you all. I’m rather psyched for that, I have to say. You’ll not believe the stuff I’ve seen here and have to show for you all.

::I hate the Yankees. At least we just routed Oakland and they lost to… Detroit: the doormat of, well, everywhere. I can’t wait for October.

::Kerry-Edwards! Brilliant! It’s in the bag, baby. Those of you who made bets with me, just remember this: 9+. God, what great news.

::My friend here has put me to shame. She’s got wicked Delhi-belly. Twenty times worse than I ever even thought of having it. Poor girl.

::Death of Vishnu is amazing. Full review to follow sometime soon.

::I’ve lost so much weight. Weird looking in the mirror. Cheeks are thinner, my body overall has acquired definition and, maybe, some tone. Running up the 160.5 stairs to the road several times a day and only eating at mealtimes will do that, I guess.

::Also, I haven’t shaved or cut my hair since I got here. Such a hilarious thing. I figure it’s best to try stupid stuff like this way out in the mountains where everyone looks weird. The not shaving thing is quite interesting. Lots of hair on my chin, the sideburns are fine, the mustache/handlebar area is a little sparse, and there’s NOTHING ELSE. My cheeks refuse to grow anything. Really an interesting thing. I’ve never tried to do this, really, so I’m going to keep going till I get bored or annoyed.